On Walking to the Library at Dawn
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For a long time I used to wake up early. I would walk to the library at dawn while everyone else was asleep, and during the winters at that hour the light would be faint, softening the features of the buildings and trees. Nothing was quite so distinct from anything else, and while at noontime the bricks on the buildings would have shone a dusty red against the pellucid sky, at dawn they were a slightly darker shade of purple, as if the colors of the sky had bled into the building itself and coagulated. The snow on the ground was also glazed with this color and lit from underneath by a soft glow, a foreshadowing of the blinding whiteness to come. At that moment the world was yet unformed, and it was the one time of day when I allowed myself the possibility that I could create a new world, one different from that which had existed the previous day. But it would only take the appearance of a stranger on the pathway to dispel this notion, just as in later years, while sitting at my desk and writing, the sounds of a passing truck or the neighbors' children going to school would indicate the routines of life were returning, the sun was up, and I would have to discontinue my writing until the next day.
Sometimes it would be snowing. The flakes in the northeast, far from the coastline where weather patterns could turn snow into a drenching sleet, were usually light and thick and drifted down from the sky at a leisurely pace. It gave the atmosphere a certain volume that was indistinguishable on clear days, because in a snowfall, as I peered ahead, I could perceive between myself and a building layers and layers of precipitation hanging like sheets from the sky. This phenomenon added to my sense of discovery, which was heightened further still if I was fortunate enough to traverse the pathways of the campus before the plows had cleared them away. Then, what lay before me was only an undulating field of virgin snow, and if I chose to look behind me, the only footprints I would see curving back like a snake across the field, were my own.
These flights of fancy were possible in the early hours of the morning not only because I was alone, but because my mind was supple and receptive to fantasies. Perhaps it was due to the fact that I had been recently immersed in sleep, and could still glimpse the light of that strange world in the corners of my vision, that at that particular time in the morning I occupied the area between fantasy and reality, nothingness and creation. This effect, this responsiveness of the mind to both the world around me and the possible secrets it contained, lasted for a few hours and helped me complete my homework for the day. If in the evening I had trouble concentrating, in the morning I could plunge into whatever piece of history or literature I had been assigned with no resistance at all, like a diver slipping into the water after plummeting from a great height. I was hardly aware of myself or my surroundings as I leapt over centuries of time, over wide swaths of earth, to land softly in another country, another period, another person’s mind. If I came across an idea or an image that required greater contemplation, I would emerge from the piece to think about it, and as I did so, I often looked around the library, at the other students seated at long tables and bent over their books, engrossed and heedless of each other (for at that hour, there was no whispering, no flirting, only serious study to prepare for the day’s classes), and realized that they, too, were immersed in their own worlds, were perhaps at that very moment sprinting along an asymptotic line that led to infinity, and that the vast library, with its high ceilings and myriad stacks of books, was paltry in its dimensions compared to the solemn hallways the mind illuminated.
But it might have been the snow itself which broke open the pregnant pouches of my mind and released these gentle flurries of the imagination. As a child brought up in a different, much warmer climate, I had always associated snow with the realm of fantasy. Nothing could seem more distant, nothing more dream-like, than a book containing the adventures of a young girl as she rode to the northern tips of the world on the back of a polar bear, to a boy sitting cross-legged on a rattan couch, naked but for a pair of shorts because of the stifling heat. And even if the medium was less purposely fantastic, if for example my family had gathered around the television to watch an American movie, I would yearn with equal fervor to be the boy, bundled up in thick winter clothing I had never used, who had fallen back contentedly on a downy pillow of snow; and I would begin to resent my bare skin dampened with sweat, the beaded glass of lime soda water that I held in my hands, and the fan spinning furiously yet uselessly overhead.
I not only associated snow with some idea of unobtainable happiness but with
The trouble began when I went to class. A sense of loss would take hold of me as I walked to the lecture hall and saw that the sky once faintly luminous, once colored at its edges with tinges of purple that suggested farther reaches than the eye could perceive, was now gray, hard and closer to the ground, like a steel cap fitted over the earth. The snow on the pathways, which had glittered here and there as if spangled with stars, had turned to mush and accumulated on the banks, lining the yet untouched fields with an unsightly frame of brown and black. Wherever I looked there were students huddled in black coats bustling to class, talking, drinking coffee, and streaming in and out of buildings.
But if the reemergence of the day, complete in its old, rigid forms, wiped away the possibilities that the dawn had promised, the loss that was greater was the one that occurred within myself. What had seemed to me so real was the image of a solitary figure walking across a land swirling with snow and suffused with strange, otherworldly light. I was another person then, one that was larger, more significant, and without body, as if the sky and the earth did not exist in their own right, but were merely elements of my vision and an extension of my thoughts. As I walked amidst the crowd of students I not only returned to my physical self, but to a version of myself that was regulated by the others around me, one that felt everywhere the strictures of reality. It would only take an encounter with a friend to complete the breach, as my own voice, unloosed out of habit to form a greeting, unused since the night before, would float into my ears, strange because it did not match the silent figure at dawn, but familiar because I had heard it everyday of my life.
At the time though, the understanding of this disconnect was not overtly realized. It lay at the periphery of my consciousness, a small, almost indiscernible emanation that over the years would swell and cast a cold light on the image of that solitary figure and everything he envisioned. As I walked side by side with my friend to class it was effortless to slip into a version of myself that I felt was false, for I believed that my destiny was foreseen elsewhere, on those walks to the library at dawn, and that my current reality was temporary and soon to be superceded. But when I emerged from my final class towards the end of the day and felt a troubling anxiety, the source of which I couldn’t locate, and knew that it would be impossible to return to the library and begin my reading assignments for the following day, it was because I felt, in some remote area of my consciousness, that the elaborate image I had painted over the world had now vanished completely. Standing at the top of the steps outside the lecture hall, looking out on to the campus filled with students, I felt humiliated, knowing that the dreams which had seemed on the cusp of realization at dawn, were nothing more than sentimental longings, imaginary creations devoid of any art.
The pain I felt would not have affected me so greatly if, once I had shed those aspects I believed to form my character and identity, I had something like that boy in the American movie to fall back on. For if, as I walked home to my dormitory, I walked past a group of students, happy and content (it seemed to me) with the knowledge that at the very least they were at home, I would realize that my own home was unreachable and offered no hope for return. I would have liked to convince this group, and I had often tried to convince my friends, that there once was a boy who had traveled on a small train up a mountainside, for I felt that if I couldn’t make the boy, the train, and the mountain exist for others, if I couldn’t transfer them from the interior world to the external, then it would be as if they had never existed. I always failed, not only because this and other stories failed to intrigue my classmates, but because it was only on those solitary walks at dawn that I could truly convince myself that the boy was real, that he was still connected to me, and that he didn’t belong exclusively to the land that I had left behind forever. I felt then that he wasn’t a part of time past, but instead, with me where he belonged, was me, and that I had only to look behind me, and instead of seeing a trail of footprints, I would see a view of the mossy mountainside through a train window, and in the gaps between plants and flowers, cottony threads of mist.
But it would take years for me to realize that these visions were false. And so every morning for a long time I would relive the same story and convince myself that it was true. But as each day ended, the identity I had created for myself would erode a little more, like statues made faceless over time. Walking back to the dormitory from class I felt that the ground beneath me was slightly unsteady, and that only a thin wafer of earth separated my feet from a fathomless abyss. One day I awoke and, in the way sudden shafts of light can erase the mysterious darkness of a church, the truth became absolutely clear, that I was someone other than what I thought I was. Or rather, I discovered that it was possible to become not one thing or the other, but something in between; to lose your distinctive features yet have no new ones to replace them; to find yourself in the depths of darkness with no light to guide the way backward or forward. What we are is nothing more than a delicate balance of cards built up into a castle, prone to the slightest wind, a mere accident of time—and when it falls, we will spend the rest of our lives putting it back together as best we can.
—RS